Description: Offering a bold and original perspective, Leadership for Sustainability explores how leadership can drive meaningful sustainability transitions through local and regional governance. The authors introduce an interpretive framework developed around the concepts of myth, metaphor and narrative, revealing sustainability as a highly productive fiction - one that enables communities to observe their environment differently and envision and organize long-term futures. Through critical analysis of sustainability narratives and a careful dismantling of common leadership myths, this book uncovers the functions and roles of leadership within governance systems. This approach illuminates how leadership can foster new modes of observation, understanding, and organization that reconnect communities, governance, and the environment. Featuring a clear and concise overview of key issues, tools, concepts and contexts for the understanding of leadership for sustainability, this is an essential insight for scholars and practitioners working in sustainability, environmental issues, leadership studies, public policy, and administration.
Brief description: Kristof Van Assche is Professor of Planning, Governance and Development at the University of Alberta. He is also affiliated with the University of the Free State in South Africa; Bonn University's Center for Development Research (ZEF) in Germany; and, in Canada, with Memorial University of Newfoundland's Harris Centre for Regional Policy and the University of Saskatchewan's Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy.
Review Quotes: 'A wonderful book, covering a vast intellectual landscape, pausing - but never resting - at heights of leadership, the ranges of governance, the plains of sustainability and the fascinating borderlands where they meet. More map than compass, an enjoyable narrative for thinkers and doers alike.' Martin Kornberger, Professor, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Visiting Professor, NHH The Norwegian School of Economics and Adjunct Professor, UNSW Business School, University of New South Wales, Australia